Since long before states started legalizing weed about a dozen years ago, the default assumption has been that cannabis use among young people, specifically teenagers, would surely increase.
This came mostly from two cohorts: prohibitionists who tend to look under rocks to find reasons why weed is bad, and the much larger group of people who came to that conclusion via “common sense.”
If something is legal, the thinking goes, it’s more readily available, so of course more people are going to use it, including those for whom it remains illegal. In this case, teenagers. But as is always the case when “common sense” is invoked, a deeper look is warranted.
Last week, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration issued a report that teen cannabis use actually declined slightly between 2022 and 2023. Over the past decade, meanwhile, reported use among people aged 12 to 17 has plunged 18% (the measure was of people who had ever tried cannabis). The rates of people in that age group reporting use of cannabis in the past month and past year have also fallen over the past 10 years.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the rate of cannabis use among all adults has fallen over the past couple of years, though it remains somewhat higher than it had been before legalization started sweeping through the states.
The takeaway: the legal status of weed might have an effect on whether some people will decide to use it, but it seems to have little aggregate effect on usage rates in either direction.
And pot being legal might actually make teens less prone to use it. One hypothesis for this is that some teenagers use weed, in part, as an act of rebellion, and the fact that it’s legal for their gym teachers to use might make it seem less rebellious to them, or even straight-up uncool.
According to the data, cannabis is less popular than alcohol among teens. Just over 11% of minors reported using weed in the past month, while more than 14.5% reported using alcohol. There is likely a good bit of overlap among those groups.
About a quarter of all Americans say they have used “illicit” substances, including cannabis (which is still illegal federally and in several states) cocaine, heroin, meth and others.
That figure hasn’t changed over the past two years, and cannabis is by far the most popular of those substances. Just under 9% of respondents said they used an illicit substance other than cannabis in the preceding year, according to the survey.
The longer-term data was collected in the ongoing National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Officials note that the survey’s methodology has changed. That yields better data, they say, but it also makes longer-term comparisons somewhat less reliable.
Meanwhile, there have been some studies indicating that pot use in legal states has risen slightly among teens and other cohorts, along with others that more-or-less comport with the SAMHSA study. But all of them indicate that, contrary to so many predictions, there has been no substantial increase in cannabis use among young people resulting from legalization.
The SAMHSA findings show that the “sensational claims” that legalization has encouraged more young people to use cannabis “are simply not backed by reliable data,” said Paul Amerntano, deputy director of NORML, the nation’s leading advocate for reforming pot laws.
The relatively few remaining prohibitionists seem befuddled as to how to spin this data. “These drugs aren’t safe and they aren’t medicine,” said Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, as quoted on the website Marijuana Moment. “This latest round of data should make it even more apparent that marijuana doesn’t meet the criteria to be rescheduled by the federal government.”
Of course, the latest round of data shows precisely the opposite.
Marijuana Moment also checked out SAM’s social media thread about the study where the increasingly flailing prohibitionist group said nothing about falling cannabis use among young people, and instead focused on the fact that more people of all ages use pot than was the case decades ago (which, duh).
It also warned, irrelevantly, about “new products engineered for addiction [that] have built an industry that will likely soon overtake Big Tobacco as America’s vice of choice.”
And that’s…bad? I guess?
